Bee Musing
As I write this, a bee is hovering around me. As a kid, I was afraid of bees. I find bugs—including arachnids, myriapods, and shrimp—generally creepy, but bugs that can attack people? Horrors!
Bees don’t bother me much any more, though, because I’ve really absorbed the idea that bees don’t want to sting anyone. Setting aside exaggerated claims that bees invariably disembowel themselves when they leave the stinger behind in the skin, they’re just plain busy with the work of finding sugar, pollen, and nesting sites to go spending their time and precious enzymes stabbing things for the heck of it. Of course, this is small comfort to someone who accidentally steps barefoot on a bee, thus giving it a reason to sting, but bees generally don’t go looking for trouble. Like rattlesnakes, they just want to be left alone.
On the other hand, bees are pretty stupid. I wrote here earlier on how expensive intelligence is in biological currency, and how insects are often smart like a computer: capable of complicated preprogrammed tasks, but incapable of responding creatively to stimuli outside their programming. This bee here is clearly no Einstein; it keeps bonking into the same cushion over and over, when succulent flowers are no more than six feet away, and the planking on the porch would make a far better nesting site. It’s just sort of bumbling around—sorry, couldn’t help myself—until it bonks into something interesting, at which point new programming will kick in.
When a mind is that tiny, it can be very predictable to an expert, but very unpredictable to a layman, like me. Bees may ordinarily be unaggressive towards people, but what if a person smells wrong because he’s eaten the wrong food, or just happens to be sitting in just the right position to create an ideal little nook for a hive? Signals invisible to us can be quite significant to a bee. Most people know smoke makes bees more docile, but not necessarily why. Recently I learned that this is because it triggers a reflex to save what can be saved from a nest in a forest fire, and a bee saving eggs is a bee too busy to attack an interloper. A little knowledge is dangerous; a bee far from the hive would not react the same way to smoke, which might surprise someone inexpertly pacifying bees at his picnic. I’ve watched people “pet” bees as they feed, stroking a finger along the back of the abdomen. Done gently enough, the bee just endures the poking and goes about its business.
So yes, normally bees won’t sting, even with a little provocation, and my second thought on seeing a bee is to relax and ignore it. But before long, I have a third thought: there’s no guarantee that tiny little mind will not misidentify me as something worth stinging, and, of course, once the attack reflex is triggered, there’s no reasoning with a bee.